Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - History

History

IANA was established informally as a reference to various technical functions for the ARPANET, that Jon Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds performed at UCLA and at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.

On March 26, 1972, Vint Cerf and Jon Postel at UCLA called for establishing a socket number catalog in RFC 322. Network administrators were asked to submit a note or place a phone call, "describing the function and socket numbers of network service programs at each HOST". This catalog was subsequently published as RFC 433 in December 1972. In it Postel first proposed a registry of assignments of port numbers to network services, calling himself the czar of socket numbers.

The first reference to the name "IANA" in the RFC series is in RFC 1060, published in 1990 by Postel and Reynolds at USC-ISI, but the function, and the term, was well established long before that; RFC 1174 says that "Throughout its entire history, the Internet system has employed a central Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)...", and RFC 1060 lists a long series of earlier editions of itself, starting with RFC 349.

In 1995, the National Science Foundation authorized Network Solutions to assess domain name registrants a $50 fee per year for the first two years, 30 percent of which was to be deposited in the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund (IIF), a fund to be used for the preservation and enhancement of the intellectual infrastructure of the Internet. There was widespread dissatisfaction with this concentration of power (and money) in one company, and people looked to IANA for a solution. Postel wrote up a draft on IANA and the creation of new top level domains. He was trying to institutionalize IANA. In retrospect, this would have been valuable, since he unexpectedly died about two years later.

In January 1998, Postel was threatened by US Presidential science advisor Ira Magaziner with the statement "You'll never work on the Internet again" after Postel collaborated with root server operators to reduce Network Solutions' influence, which had undermined IANA's authority over the root zone. Regaining control of the root from Network Solutions would have clarified his authority to create new top-level domains as a step to resolving the DNS Wars, but he ended his effort after Magaziner's threat, and died not long after.

Jon Postel managed the IANA function from its inception on the ARPANET until his death in October 1998. By his almost 30 years of "selfless service", Postel created his de facto authority to manage key parts of the Internet infrastructure. After his death, Joyce K. Reynolds, who had worked with him for many years, managed the transition of the IANA function to ICANN.

Starting in 1988, IANA was funded by the U.S. government under a contract between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Information Sciences Institute. This contract expired in April 1997, but was extended to preserve IANA.

• On December 24, 1998, USC entered into a transition agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN, transferring the IANA function to ICANN, effective January 1, 1999, thus making IANA an operating unit of ICANN.
• On February 8, 2000, the Department of Commerce entered into an agreement with ICANN to perform the IANA functions.
• In June 1999, at its Oslo meeting, IETF signed an agreement with ICANN concerning the tasks that IANA would perform for the IETF; this is published as RFC 2860.
• In November 2003, Doug Barton was appointed IANA manager.
• In 2005, David Conrad was appointed as IANA manager.
• in 2010, Elise Gerich was appointed as IANA manager.